How Chrome Raced to 2nd Spot in 2 Years! [Browser Wars]

I admit to being a die-hard Chrome fan. I like Firefox a lot of how customizable it is. Chrome’s minimalist layout, simple sync options along with Apps and extensions makes it my browser of choice. I guess a lot of people think like me and are adopting Chrome. Latest reports by StatCounter suggest that Chrome has a market share of 25.69% while Firefox has slumped to 3rd place with 25.23%.

Internet Explorer is still at top with 40.63% but over two years ago it was almost near the 60% mark.

So let us see the growth of Chrome over the last two years. It had about 4.44% of the market share in November 2009 and has grown to get over 25% in only 2 years.

If you see the graph above, Chrome’s rise seems to be consistently on an upward trend. There do not seem to be big spikes at all. This means they are growing consistently and continuously.

Firefox has fallen off somewhat over the last year and that is not surprising. As Chrome churned out extensions and Chrome apps. It even introduced Chromebooks where the Chrome becomes the OS.

Comparatively Firefox has lost its way. A good indicator was how it launched Firefox 4.0 earlier this year after almost 1 year of anticipation. Firefox gets updated more often than ever all of a sudden and Firefox 8 is already available.

Internet Explorer has not managed to hold on to their users and is consistently losing out. The success of Windows 7 has not exactly spilled on to Internet Explorer.

It’s surprising that Chrome has gone ahead of Firefox. I don’t see it as a victory of the browser. Chrome only raced to the second spot because it is Google’s. It advertised the browser on the search pages. As a result of this everyone came to know about it. Earlier many people didn’t even know that there were browsers other than IE. The interface was way more clean than IE 7 or 8 and that attracted novice users who didn’t know what all the buttons and menus were for.

Aditya Kane

@Gourav: I agree about Chrome being really simplistic but id does not allow toolbars and makes the viewing area a lot bigger than Firefox. It might be simplistic for you and me but a lot of people do not want to do much with their browser except browser websites, check email and look up Facebook. This is where Firefox sort of misses out.

Chromes no. 2 position is anticipated and there is no reason for any surprise.
First of all Chrome is faster than Firefox. It looks great, boasts of having some Google’s own features like voice search, rich ‘original’ web apps like angrybirds, sprigpad that even comes with offline support, easy customization via themes, unique new tabs..
I am sure Chrome will reach to the no 1 spot most probably in 2012

-Google’s relentless advertising (tv ads, ads on youtube, etc.)
-It’s very minimalistic and fast right out of the box.
-Has many apps and games in it’s webstore.

Firefox, however, will always be the power user’s browser. You can customize its interface(Chrome can’t), its extensions are much more mature and advanced than Chrome’s, its themes can change the entire look of the browser, not just the background, and finally, with the Fasterfox Lite addon, you can make it just as fast as Chrome. I personally will never switch from Firefox because I need every single one of my 87 addons and Firefox is and will always be the king of customizability.